Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Joanna Lumley - Page 2

I'm very good at getting up in the morning - so much of my life has been spent on film sets where we start at the crack of dawn.

Buy an atlas and keep it by the bed - remember you can go anywhere.

I never wanted to go to university: books seemed to have all the answers, and the questions, too. I went to work for Jean Muir as her in-house model. Miss Muir - as she will always be to me - was interested in everything.

I'm not terribly good at three-page recipes - I tend to skip bits - or anything that involves marinating things in juniper berries.

I think I'm a spiritual person. I don't really go to church often when services are on, but I like going in when they are empty and quiet, and just sitting there and thinking for a little while.

I've always used my hair for whatever it is needed for. I had it an inch long and jet black for a Pinter play I did. Changes you completely.

I'd been a Bond girl and in Dracula films and 'Coronation Street,' but I was always hunting for work. After 'The New Avengers,' I never had to wait for work again.

I don't do girlfriendy sort of things, like shopping or going to spas. Spas fill me with horror. Frankly, I'd be more interested in doing a walk through the sewers of London!

I could never go into politics, because I'm far too impatient and I'd want to be a dictator, albeit a benevolent one... I would hope.

My great-great-great uncle - or maybe it's only two 'greats' - crossbred the first Aberdeen Angus.

I don't lose my temper. I used to, but I realised I would probably die of a brain hemorrhage. So I've governed myself not to mind about things. I have no road rage or anything like that. Because it's life-shortening. And also, there's no need for it; it uses up energy.

Romance is quite an overblown word. This idea of chocolates and champagne and that's it. There's more to love than that. Romance is quite a soppy word. Love is much more important.

Even clingfilm - if it's gone over a salad bowl, take it off, use it again. I wash out carrier bags; I save brown paper from parcels. I save string; I save ribbons. I separate all my bits and pieces.

I'm three quarters Scottish, but I sound English. I don't really see British as a race.

I'd describe myself as a saver, but just sometimes I can spend like a kicking horse! Ryman is the one shop I can't go past without going into. I just can't resist lovely stationery.

Women are very different to men, and that hasn't been respected. So when people say there's never been a good woman painter or poet or engineer or whatever, they don't understand that our skills are many simultaneously and men's skills are single.

Ah, Scotland. I am three-parts Scottish and terribly proud of it, although maybe we should divide it into eighths, because my two-eighths are Danish and English, the Lumley part. But the bulk of the rest of me is Scottish - and Scottish ministers especially.

I think laptops should be banned from schools. Until you can prove you can add up on your fingers or think independently in your head, you have learnt nothing.

We've forgotten to respect clothes and consider who made them and where the material came from. We've been encouraged to buy things and, if we don't like them, bin them. When I grew up, we'd repair things or alter them.

My mother early on taught us to respect all animals, and I mean all animals - not just cats and dogs but rats and snakes and spiders and fish and wildlife, so I really grew up believing they are just like us and just as deserving of consideration.

That's the staggering, humorous thing about money. If you haven't got taste, money doesn't matter: You'll always look ghastly.

Oh, I'm not beautiful. I can look beautiful; I can put beauty on. When I'm tired, I look bloody awful. I think I'm turning into the actress from 'Dynasty,' Linda Evans.

I was 21 and had been going out with my boyfriend for two years when I found out I was pregnant - despite being told by doctors that I was sterile. Jamie's father and I hadn't discussed marriage, and to me, it wasn't something to be entered into just to stop gossip.

Our bodies will be recycled one way or another, but what about our ideas and minds and characters? Primordial soup? The bourne from which no traveller returns? Interesting and exciting.

I used to panic and get rattled when I was young, but as I've got older, I've started literally to live day to day. With age, you work out what matters.

There is something so quiet and so industrious, something so Viking about the Scots.

I'm a pathetic haggler and often give more than the original price out of a misplaced sense of duty.

I do not like bad photographs. I don't like to be badly lit. There is a fashion, particularly on stage, for very 'toppy' lighting, which makes a child look 50. Ten o'clock is very good. If someone is taking a picture, you say, 'Lamps at 10 o'clock,' then everybody looks lovely.

If you haven't understood that if you are born you die, you scarcely deserve to be able to be alive.

People have always tut-tutted about actors stepping out of line politically. And I can sort of see it because what you've got your fame for is not being someone who can influence things, so it's cheating.

I haven't got a very sweet tooth, but I love salted things like nuts. I would have to be dragged in by a lorry if I ate as many salted peanuts as I would like to.

In Ethiopia... you might find a seven-year-old expected to take 15 goats out into the fields for the whole day with only a chapati to eat and his whistle. Why are we so afraid to give our children responsibilities like this?

To be in something as iconic as a Dracula film, and to be playing Jessica van Helsing, who would have been Dracula's choice for a bride, through history and beyond the grave, was a thrill.

I'm boiling about the rainforests being chopped down to make disposable chopsticks. I'm boiling about the fact that we have palm oil put into every single one of our substances.

As Brits, we love a do, don't we? I adore our national celebrations. If I see a gold coach, you almost need to put me in a straitjacket, I get so excited.

I never go to the gym - I can't be doing with it. But I run up and down the stairs, wash my feet in the basin to keep supple, and I don't eat things that have a pulse.

I have never had anything done to my face because then you end up looking as they all do in America. Look at Judi Dench: she would never be as good if she had had work done.

All you have to be is kind. That's all you need. Once you've got that, it virtually rules out everything else.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

You see, there weren't these magazines like 'Heat' in my day. Always waiting to trip up these pretty girls and make them seem something horrible, something to make them look stupid and small and ugly and disgusting.

Way back in the 1970s, I was eating a steak, and I looked down, and for the first time it suddenly looked like flesh to me - like a dead creature. In a flash, I realized that every time I ate any kind of meat, something had been killed for me, and I stopped eating all animals, not just cows and pigs but chickens and fish.

I have never felt the constraints of social acceptability.

It's nice when you happen into a vegetarian restaurant, but really, you can find veggie food everywhere. Pastas, salads, a vegetable plate - I actually like ordering vegetarian in a meaty place because it gives them a jolt to come up with something and recognize the demand.

I've had my run-ins with department stores, like Harrods, which stopped selling fur coats, but I found some there with fur trim, which is just as disgusting. Foie gras production is appalling - there's no excuse for selling it.

I've never been interested enough to have a career trajectory. I've never had any ambition or thought of what I should be doing or had any idea of what I'd like to do. Never. And still don't. And if something comes along, I say 'Fine.'

When I was trying to get into acting, to have been a model was about as low as you could get in the acting profession. But that wasn't sexism, it was snobbery, which I knew and took very humbly.

I love a cardboard coffin. Both Mummy and Daddy went off in cardboard coffins, painted - Daddy's was rifle green. Beautifully made.

I was once kissed on the lips by a giraffe, and I don't think I've ever got over it.

To be a judge you don't have to know about books, you have to be skilled at picking shrapnel out of your head.

I prefer not to eat food that has a face.

Sure, good things can go badly wrong. Nevertheless, there's always another day.

I don't feel like I am 66 at all. I feel more like I am 35. But I have a bus pass so it must be true.

I am now an old lioness, if I see my young ones getting out of order, I've got to be able to say to them this is not how lions behave. This is not right.

Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. Thats it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

I am blessed beyond the realms of blessedness, and easily the greatest pleasure is giving it away

You must swear never to go on the dole. Never be bored. Find something to do. And don't yawn.

The Treorchy Male Choir's version of "Myfanwy" is one of the most glorious things I've ever heard in all my long life. Love and congratulations to you all.

I think handbags, not so much clothes anymore, but I think you can tell a fashion victim by their handbag.

I've been given this blessing, which is my granddaughter. You're no longer just you. You suddenly fit into the chest of drawers of life.